These are selections from the final chapters of Paul Crowther’s
‘The Phenomenology of Modern Art", 2012
The text has been quoted in this color
Note: Mr. Crowther writes philosophy- not art history or criticism.
He introduces specific works of art only as they relate to his ideas.
His discussion of those examples, however, is his only text that interests me.
So I jump from painting to painting
giving my own response to the piece before studying his.
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Bridget Riley, Fall, 1963
A Bridget Riley show came to Chicago in 2022 - and I admired her early, figurative work. I found her op-Art, however, to be boring from a distance and clumsy up close. She had hit upon a successful formula in the stylish London of the sixties and she would ride it to fame and fortune. This piece, now visible to me only on the internet, is probably not much different. It’s an optical gag - and nothing more. I do not feel compelled to include it in a discussion of abstract painting just because it was sold by an art gallery.
Crowther, however, makes much more of it as follows:
It is important to emphasize that the enigmatic quality in question here, is ontological, rather than normative. Such a feature makes abstraction different from other idioms; it does not make it superior to them. For just as the emergence of Figure (in other forms of painting) depends on the quality of the work, so too, the emergence of abstraction's enigmatic or apparitional character is dependent on the inventiveness of the individual work's style.
No doubt Deleuze would object to this equalization on the grounds that - as we saw earlier - for him, abstraction, by its nature is only a 'cerebal' address to the brain. It is unable to impact directly on the nervous system and generate that all-important 'sensation' which, for Deleuze, is the central effect of painting.
However, in this respect, let us consider another work by Bridget Riley - namely Fall of 1963
We will recall how much Deleuze emphasizes the idea of fall as a basis of our experience of sensation in painting. Riley's painting addresses this phenomenon quite explicitly. Deleuze would probably claim that such a work merely represents' Fall rather than makes it a factor in how Figure is perceived to emerge from material ground.
This would be a mistaken response, however. What is striking about the painting is the way it immerses and overwhelms - descending from immediate optical impact into an evocation of flow and counter flow that appears impressed into the surface of the work. There is an evocation of tactile referents, no matter how shallow the illusionistic involved in these. Vision as sensation rather than 'cerebal' recognition is paramount.
The point is, therefore, that while some works of abstraction' in the Deleuzian sense may strike us cerebally, others will involve much more of a direct address to the 'nervous system". Which of these (if either) is involved, is entirely down to the individual style of the work. We cannot simply assign patterns of response a priori on the basis of the ontology of such works.
A painting must address much more than the nervous system for me to take interest. No single word will suffice - but "soul" comes the closest.
Jackson Pollock, Gray #14, 1948
This piece presents such a conundrum for me.
So many areas of detail are cosmic, and amazing. How did he drip those fine lines with such precision? How did build such a delightful overall design on-the-fly?
His abilities were awesome.
But….. some of the larger, heavy splotches are just that: big, nasty, angry, painful. Life as a wonderful horror show. It makes me feel queasy and unbalanced.
And yet .. I may be demanding something different from a work of art than Crowther does. I need to connect it - in some way - with the great mystery of why are we here, what should we be doing. Pollack’s angry despair falls short of that— no matter how allusive his "Figure" may be.
The upshot is that, in Pollock's work, there is a major dimension of allusive Figure that is made emergent from the diagrammatic elements. This is not the manual space that Deleuze describes, but, rather, one that has affinity to his favoured notion of haptic space - wherein the optical and the manual are integrated.
Now the Pollock work I have just discussed is the one which, as far as I can tell, is closest to the manual line emphasized by Deleuze. However, as we have seen, it quite clearly exceeds the reductive Deleuzian interpretative framework. And all Pollock's other works, and that of other art informel practitioners bring this home even more. In their painting there is the emergence of allusive Figure. As we have seen, Deleuze himself suggests that much abstract art is 'figurative' but does not offer any more detailed discussion of this slightly pejorative characterization.
This is extremely unfortunate. For the pervasive weakness of Deleuze's approach to abstract art is its unwarranted essentializing. He presents abstraction and art informel as opposite extremes, with 'figurative' abstraction covering the rest, as a kind of poor outsider.
Unfortunately, Deleuze did not comment on this piece - so it’s not as helpful as the Francis Bacon paintings discussed in the first chapter.
This watercolor feels so much crisper and livelier than the much larger oil paintings.
Every small patch is popping with excitement - while the distance seems as close as the foreground - pulling me into the center. It feels like I’m there - squinting under the bright sunlight.
A delicate pencil and watercolour study of Mont Sainte-Victoire from 1902-6 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) can be used to illuminate Hofmann's position. The brushstrokes are mainly in the form of relatively uniform-sized dabs - each one functoning as a small plane. The contrasting colours embodied in these, and the wispier forms that swirl across them or stand upright, have a striking twofold effect.
On the one hand, the dynamics of push and pull between them, creates a sense of recessional depth. But on the other, they also create rhythms that strike up, and play across the picture plane. Indeed, the delicate transparencies of these mini planes overlap and merge with one another, in surprisingly vigorous terms. In this way, pictorial depth and planar insistence are mediated in a free unity.
No mention is made of colors that push (pink, orange) versus colors that pull (blue, green).
Now, of course, the planar insistency of Cezanne's later work is very familiar from earlier chapters, but Hofmann regards it, also, as a major factor in pre-modern art. We are told, for example , that 'push and pull' is the secret of Michelangelo's 'monumentality' and Rembrandt's 'universality.
Michelangelo, Doni Tondo, 1503-4
Not yet as powerful as the paintings for the Sistine Chapel begun four years later.
The small family is visiting a beach where nude young men appear to be cruising each other.
Foreground and background are awkwardly linked by a young fellow’s head and shoulders. So much feels out of kilter. The giant legs of Joseph, the masculine arms of Mary, the parapet wall that seems so much closer on the right than left, the sharp break between the blue drapery thrusting forward and the pink blouse rising upward.
To see what is at issue, here, it is useful to consider these two artists in rather more detail than Hofmann does himself. Michelangelo's early Doni Madonna of around 1503, for example, represents the Holy Family in a tondo format where the foreground area presents extremely emphatic three-dimensional effects that almost appear to spring towards the viewer. At the same time, however, the main body of the group and a background band of nudes, provide strong horizontal emphases that constrain the visually explosive plastic effect in a firm but - as it were friendly, planar ground. I say friendly here, because the factors involved in this constraint - notably the shallow ledge that traverses the entire lower horizontal centre behind the main group- are ones which achieve it through reinforcements of the plane that actively counterpoints the energy of the main group.
Actually - the piece looks better without the foreground and background - making it more like a large, polychrome relief medallion - accentuating it’s sculptural properties. One volume pulls against another - rather than surface vs. depth.
I’m guessing that, as a sculptor, M. began with this central cluster - and then he (or someone else) filled in the edges to make it more acceptable as a painting. It was not an improvement.
Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Cuyp, 1632
A wonderful contrast between, and among, the many faces of the living versus the passive corpse in repose. A nice sense of mystery and wonder in the face of mortality. Yet still, it’s more like a competent group portrait than a great painting. The artist was required to make every face recognizable and the same size - regardless of any spatial or narrative effect.
It looks much better without the two peripheral portraits.
I’m guessing they were tacked on at the end
when a few guys complained about being left out.
Kandinsky, Cossacks, 1910-11, 37 x 51"
A fever dream in a nursery? It feels like a boy child’s world of playful, dizzying exaggeration -
like the Nutcracker ballet - the toys have come alive. It's not how someone relates to life in the world - it's looking inward to play.
Kandinsky wrote the book on spirituality in secular art. His innovation in non-objective painting echoes through the century that followed. He is iconic in the world of art. But how important is his work to the practice - any practice - of spirituality?
The above feels marginal.
They seem to peek beneath the surface of the world we know
and reveal the amazing complexity and beauty beneath.
Here’s what Crowther wrote:
Given a plane surface, therefore, it is only natural for us to repeat the basic impetus of perception itself, by looking for three-dimensional forms suggested by this particular configuration. This means that the presumption of virtuality is more than just a convention, it has an ontological foundation - it repeats, in virtual terms the basic trajectory of the origins of visual perception, from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. True, pictorial space is not real in literal terms, but it is so, in virtual terms - as something that emerges through the embodied subject's cognitive development of a two-dimensional surface.
Before considering all this as the basis for a general theory of abstract art, it is worth getting a sense of how optical illusion can be read in terms of virtuality by reference to important historical examples - where the pictorial space characteristic of abstraction first emerges.
In a work such as Wassily Kandinsky's Cossacks of 1910-11 , for example, the headgear and suggestion of lances provide visual cues that - in conjunction with the work's title - allow the viewer to develop the title's thematic as an imaginative visual fantasy.
Kandinsky, Composition No. 6, 1913, 76 x 118"
Crowther discussed this large piece as well - and it’s much closer to the Campbell panels - which seem to be Composition No.6 a few moments later as it begins to fly apart. Kandinsky was on a journey. Eventually it would take him to a more static place that does not appeal to me. But in the meantime —- Wow!
Here’s how Crowther writes about it:
Thank you, Paul Crowther. Everything I was thinking - and more. Yes, indeed, this piece does precede the insufferable "stable planar structures" of ten years later.
Mondrian , Composition 8, 1924, 37 x 22
Feels like it began with a pixelated photo of an urban park with plenty of trees, bushes, and people. Those elements were then adjusted to make the seething, enjoyable arrangement shown above. No matter where you focus, it’s never boring. The colors, edges, and mellow feeling all suggest landscape.
You might call it decorative - but it's too intensely arranged to sleep in the background once it's noticed.
Mondrian's work from around the same time takes us in very different directions. Here the pictorial momentum involves a gradual crystallization of the tumult of the three-dimensional world of nature, into a purified network of relations based on planar relations embodied in pure colours and insistent perpendiculars. The sense is very much one of abstracting from nature. In Composition 8 of 1914 (Guggenheim Museum, New York), for example, what started out as a tree is abstracted into a structure of platelets and planes within a restricted colour range of greys, pinks, and light browns. The only concession to natural organic appearance is the curvilinear corners of the individual platelets and planes.
There's only four curvilinear edges - but they have such a strong effect.
Mondrian, Composition and Grid VII, 1919, 19 x 19"
I don't find it tedious or boring - but what keeps it that way with its strict adherence to solid color panels in an orthogonal grid? It's deceptively quiet. We might have to give credit to Mondrian for inventing the genre of paintings that are about nothing but uncanny design. No emotion - no self expression - just puzzlement at a kind of unexpected perfection.
By the time of Composition with Grid VIl of 1919 (Kröller Muller Museum, Otterlo), this concession has been removed. Planes in the form of absolutely regular squares and rectangles (with the same subdued colour range as in the earlier work) preponderate. If this work started out as a creative abstracting from some familiar three-dimensional natural or artefactual form, then the identity of that form has been lost in the transformation. We are left with a self-contained whole whose optical illusion might be taken as alluding to micro-cellular or crystalline
Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, 1921
(This might not be the piece to which Crowther refers. The title and date are the same, but it is not in the Tate)
Is there any limit to how many combinations of these simple elements can be peaceful, balanced, monumental, and intriguing? I guess not. They might serve as standards for architectural design - or lectures on how red, yellow, and blue behave on a flat surface. They feel both humorous and scientific.
In this respect, consider the Composition with Yellow, Red, and Blue, of 1921 (Tate Modern, London). This work presents a kind of geometrical trellising that is evocative of the internal structural filamentary features of many natural and artificial visual phenomena - that is, it is suggestive of how they might appear, if they were made visible. In another respect, Mondrian's picture isolates certain micro features that might characterize the surfaces of many varieties of organic and inorganic material - if we could see them magnified enough.
Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960, 71.75 x 72"
Which is more tedious? The blurry daisy or the precise herring bone pattern, both of which span the canvas? Are we supposed to be enlightened by discovering that both can be recognized? The dark, muted color is depressing. So are the amorphous petals and relentless grid. Was that the intended expression?
Or assuming that there is something profound this piece can show us - is there any need to look at it more than once?
Utamaro, Woman Reading a letter under Mosquito Net, 1798
By way of comparison, here’s an image that also places organic shapes behind a grid that partially conceals them. Though aesthetically and emotionally, that is where the similarity ends.
Crowther had this to say:
The challenge is, therefore, to find a principle of unity that can engage with this three-dimensional world, but in terms other than those involved in figurative art. As far as I can see, the link with transperceptual space is the only way in which this can be done. And, in doing it, we begin to explain how abstract art and spiritual reality and/or emotional states, can be linked in more than superficial and rhetorical terms. This is because recognitions of transperceptual unity have, as it were, a special 'spiritual' charge, through employing sophisticated cognitive competences that are usually taken for granted (and thence not noticed) in our mundane practical engagements with the world. Abstract works demand these competences as the direct basis of our perceptual engagement with the artwork.
And what is especially expressive about this is that reference is based on allusion rather than mere visual resemblance between the pictorial work and what it represents. In this respect, we might consider Agnes Martin's White Flower of 1960 (Guggenheim Museum, New York). This work consists of a square canvas covered in repeated sequences of tiny uniformly sized rectangles (and rectangles within rectangles). These forms are distributed across the canvas in exact vertical columns, with further horizontal columns that intersect the verticals at exact intervals (from the top to the bottom of the work).
There is a boundary area (forming a square also) where the basic, uniformly sized rectangles contain no smaller units within themselves. The lessening of visual density, here, creates a plane within the work overall, which appears to stand out from the background.
Superficially, the work suggests a detail from some larger piece of woven fabric; or even a cross-section through some network of lattices (e.g. those formed by the internal girders in a building, or by a network of circuitry). In these respects, it engages with different possibilities from level (i) of transperceptual space.
At the same time, however, the work is, in literal descriptive terms an exploration of how shape creates density in visual appearance - level (iv) of transperceptual space. And to explore this relation highlights an interesting optical gestalt - wherein attending to the density of the rectangles' distribution leads us to focus not only on them, but also on the spaces between them.
Instead of perceiving rectangles we see the less distinct black trellises created through the gaps, and, in this way, the central relief plane now appears as a kind of curtain, with the suggestion of an indeterminate, but living something-or-other showing through it.
Now if this work had indeed been a part of some woven fabric, we would not have noticed any of the effects just described. It would have simply been a factor that enabled us to recognize the whole per se. The fact that the work is a self-contained painting, means that its optical structures are to the fore, and engage different levels of transperceptual space, simultaneously. And it is this allusive complexity which explains abstract art's distinctive expressive power.
My primary issue here is "Allusive complexity". I will join Hamlet in attributing that to the viewer, not the viewed ("very like a whale"). Isn’t expressive power artist centered ?
But I’m also wondering - why didn’t Crowther identify the "indeterminate but living something-or-other " as a flower (taking a clue from the title) ? Could he not recognize it? Perhaos nothing flower-like is visible in the actual painting, rather than the internet image available to me.
And why can’t woven textiles have transperceptual spaces, whereas paintings can? Has Crowther never seen a 17th c. tapestry? Some present an Albertian picture box, leaving viewers to straighten out all the sagging straight lines.
This is the most puzzling of all Crowther’s commentary in the book. He constructs a conceptual edifice that could just as easily be built with any bolt of herringbone cloth.
Here is a quote from the artist:
Sounds like a true articulation of what she is doing - though formlessness is hardly a worthy goal for a person or society. It’s a deathwish. No goal, or idealism of any kind, is involved.
Jackson Pollock, No.1, 1950
This can be elucidated through a further - very different example, namely Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In this 'all-over' painting, Pollock indeed distributes forms all over the canvas - albeit with a slight concentration of black elements around the edges. This concentration creates a dominant - but frayed - frontal plane, whose optical dynamics of fraying invest the work with considerable animation.
The great power of this lies in the complex way in which the animation suggests organic or physical process. Of course, it does so allusively, rather than in straightforwardly representational terms. Specifically it plays across the first three levels of trans-perceptual space with equal insistency.
On the one hand, it may be presenting a highly magnified close-up of some imagined vegetal formation; on the other hand it could be a perspective on an entirely alternative perceptual or physical environment to our own; or yet again, it could be a subtle variation on, deconstruction of, some familiar example of so simple a thing as entwining foliage. It may even be that the work suggests a detail of stone - such as granite, viewed close-up, but with a kind of higher level (and magical) optical reversal taking place - insofar as the 'mineral' ingredients are disposed in ways suggestive of some organic presence growing in, or fossilized within the stone.
The very hovering between these (and, indeed, other possibilities from the three relevant levels) give the viewer a sense of being present at the birth of the visually specific, or at the moment of its transformation.
If Crowther feels three layers of trans-perceptual space here - he’s welcome to it. For whatever reason, the many possible allusions here do not interest me - except for the overall allusion to a cosmos. And that cosmos feels very NYC to me.
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In conclusion: as mentioned after reading the first few pages - I’m disappointed with Crowther’s phenomenology of art. Despite it’s plain speaking - it’s written for fellow academic philosophers - basing itself on a tradition of thinking about experience - rather than his own experience with looking at paintings as the wild/crazy/uplifting/transcendent/surprising/ comforting phenomena that they can be. Isn't that how a "phenomenology of art"should be?
Given its relevance to geometry, theories of pictorial space in art have been of primary interest to an intellectual tradition that seeks the scientific validation of mathematics. This goes back to Alberti (1440-1472) - and it’s alive and well with Crowther. It's time for Western Civilization to grow out of it.
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